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ON the morning of Nov 9, I became Christopher Columbus. I discovered a new America.
Even though elections are held everywhere across the world, none will be remembered more than the recent contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the White House. An 18-month-long gauntlet ran its full course from A to Z: A for acrimony, B for bitterness to X for xenophobia, Z for zealotry. The savage combat ended with a result neither had expected. She got a majority of the popular vote; he got the presidency.
Political pundits have gone apoplectic trying to explain why their predictions could have gone so awry. Their public self-flagellation is painful to watch, but nothing compared to the soul-searing introspection the Democratic Party must be undergoing nowadays.
The combat ended with a result neither had expected.
Its candidate had everything. She had experience as a senator and as secretary of state. As the wife of a twice-elected president and twice a candidate for the presidency herself, she had an insider’s familiarity with four presidential campaigns. She said the right things, she struck the right chords, she demonstrated that she could survive humiliatingly personal attacks, and she had the determination to pole-vault into the Oval Office.
Many years ago, she subordinated her own ambitions to ensure that her husband became (and remained) president. At last, it was her turn. She felt destined to repeat for her gender the miracle that Barack Obama had performed for his Afro-American community. What she and her Democrat advisers misread (with fatal consequences) was the psyche of the mid-American white Republican voter.
Comparisons have been drawn between Britain’s Brexit referendum in June this year and the US presidential campaign. In Britain, the public treated the referendum as yet another poll; in the US, daily polls were imbued with a terminal finality. Each reading was consecrated, each percentage point sanctified as if it was the actual result.
During the night of Nov 8-9, political commentators watched with obvious dismay as Trump’s lead spread across the US map like a blood stain, coagulating into a political pool of Republican red. Their faces turned even redder. Only President Putin in Moscow’s Red Square had a smirk on his face.
It would not be churlish to suggest that Donald Trump shared the world’s surprise at the margin of his victory. We knew what he would do if he lost. But one suspects not even he knew what he would do if he won.
It is too early to apply the telescope of history to president-elect Trump. He is still to be sworn in, and has four years after that. His personality though is already under a microscope. His attributes are being enlarged, his flaws magnified.
His Teutonic ancestry (his grandparents were German immigrants) may explain a shared characteristic with another German, described by a one-time admirer as possessing “remarkable duplicity — indeed, ‘multiplicity’ would be a better word. With enormous histrionic intuition, he could shape his behaviour to changing situations in public while letting himself go with his intimates, servants or adjutants”. This assessment — penned safely post facto — was made by Albert Speer of his Fuehrer Adolf Hitler.
The 21st century has forgotten Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Embedded in its 550-plus pages, are two prescient paragraphs. One reads: “…it may happen that for centuries many are discontent with the form in which their religious life expresses itself and yearn for a renovation of it; and so it may happen that through this impulse of the soul, some dozens of men may arise who believe that, by virtue of their understanding and their knowledge, they are called to solve the religious difficulties of the time and accordingly present themselves as the prophets of a new teaching, or at least as declared adversaries of the standing beliefs.”
The second paragraph is even more potent: “The moment a man arises who profoundly understands the distress of his people and, having diagnosed the evil with perfect accuracy, takes measures to cure it; the moment he fixes his aim and chooses the means to reach it — then paltry and pettifogging people become all attention and eagerly follow the doings of this man who has thus come before the public gaze.” And Hitler had never met Narendra Modi nor Nigel Farage.
Until now, foreign governments have treated Mr Trump as America’s Boris Yeltsin or UK’s Boris Johnson. Europeans are sceptical of him, but President Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel have their own re-elections next year to worry about. Mr Trump will be in power until 2021. They may not.
Mexican illegal immigrants huddle on the wrong side of a border soon to be petrified into a wall. Chinese capitalists find themselves on the wrong side of the Great Wall. Ironically, Mao’s East is no longer red. Today, the United States is.
The writer is an art historian.
Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2016
